Building a PVR PC... on the cheap?

[Sailn]

tigerdirect has a real cheap box on sale $339

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...=S452-2000%20B

just put an os on it, and a few pvr250 or e-home wonders and maybe a few more drives.

[rrussell]

Hi, Ren -

Thanks for the info. I have no idea what my CPU temp was, I think it was strictly the HD shutting down due to heat. It's a maxtor Diamondmax - what brand is yours?

I'm considering moving into a Travla C137 or 138. My 2699 ended up a real Frankenbox, and it's not very nice to look at among the other equipment.

[falchulk]

FYI, my 2699 definitely had heat issues when using the HW acceleration. It would lock hard after maybe 20 minutes or so. I drilled holes over the processor and added an old PS fan to the top of the case. It works fine now and the fan is relatively quiet compared to my shuttle.

[LSHorwitz]

I wonder if anybody has considered using a Dell 2400 as either a Sage TV server or as a client? At $399 is looks like a very inexpensive solution. Not sure that the on-board video supports overlay. There may be some other issues that I am not aware of.

I've had very good results with a Dell PIII 500 MHz machine that was just sitting around here idle and is now an excellent client with superb performance and stability. Wish I had another one, but will probably try the 2400 route unless others know of any problems or issues.

[TunaBoo]

We had a few 2400s at work we got "free", haven't done much with them. In general, it is better to buy a $50 geforce2/3 video card than try and use integrated video.

[RenHoek]

Rob-
I'm using a 160GB Seagate Barracuda - it's awsome: VERY quiet & not too hot.

One tip w/ the 2699 case: route your HDD cables _UNDER_ the motherboard, with a cardboard spacer between them (to keep from tearing up the cable on the sharp pins of the mobo). That way, there's a lot more space on top of the board for cooling. The North/Southbridge heatsink likes to breathe, too.

I was considering the C137 case for this HTPC, but I wasn't sure if a normal 3.5" drive would fit, so I went with the 2699. Since then, I stumbled across a better description of it, and I think it does support a 3.5" drive...It's also got the bigger power supply by default...maybe next time 'round.

-RenHoek

[tobszanski]

RenHoek,

It's funny you mentioned the C137! I still haven't gotten all of the pieces for my new box together yet, but found the C137 and think I'll go with that over the 2699 because of the beefed up power supply, support for a 3.5" drive, along with two PCI slots (only if you use a .75" drive, otherwise it's one PCI slot (which is fine for me right now)). Until Hauppauge comes out with better support for for the new PVR250 when combined with older cards (like my PVR350), I'll still with the USB2 device for additional tuners.

Casetronic has an excellent comparison spreadsheet available at http://www.casetronic.com/Product/PC...omp-chart.html which shows different configurations of components, what will work together, and what won't.

My updated list looks like:

Travla C137 case (new)
Epia EM6000 motherboard (new)
512Mb RAM (existing)
200Gig HD (existing)
Slim CD-ROM (existing)
PVR-350 (existing)

All together a reasonable concoction of new and existing parts to allow me to use my Shuttle SN41G2 as my primary machine and relegate my creaky old Athlon 1800+ to file-server duties (it needs to have a fresh XP install done on it anyway).

[RenHoek]

That's the chart I came across after I'd already gone the 2699 route! Let us know how that setup works out - I'm curious about the M6000 running, as well as your thoughts on the quality/design of the case.

-Ren

[tobszanski]

I will post a followup message once I receive the case and motherboard, I'll be ordering them next week. After looking at the reviews for this case, I found that the only complaint is about a fairly loud 60mm fan. Guess what one of my first mods is going to be if I find noise objectionable....

[LSHorwitz]

Originally posted by TunaBoo
We had a few 2400s at work we got "free", haven't done much with them. In general, it is better to buy a $50 geforce2/3 video card than try and use integrated video.

I want an inexpensive card which has DVI-Digital output like the Geforce FX5200 for about $60 in the AGP version. I wonder if the PCI version of the FX5200 would handle video adequately to be a good Sage Client? PCI-bus bandwidth should be fast enought to handle the video, and AGP should be overkill for streaming video.

[krutaw]

Originally posted by nicktripp
I was also interested in building a box "on the cheap." I ended up putting just under $500 into the box. That was with one encoder (PVR-250), an NVidia 5200FX, 120GB HD, PIII 600MHz, 384MB of RAM on Windows XP Pro.

I have been extremely happy with the performance and usefulness of this box. I haven't had any problems with it but, now that I've got the HTPC bug, I'm building a much beefier machine with multiple encoders and such.

If you'd like to see my work (in a sparsely documented fashion) on the cheap box, I blogged most of it. (The oldest post will be at the bottom.) You can see that here.

OH WOW!! Smallworld.. a friend of mine showed me your website about 3 days before I became addicted to this stuff. I read through it and read through it and finally took the plunge...

Small world..